Survival test I found online

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I only got 56% on my first go at it, with an ability to stay alive of -20%, but protection from elements and catching rescuers’ attention scored at 94%

I skipped the 5 gallons of water because a: It weighs nearly 50 pounds, and b: I was planning to use the plastic sheeting to distill seawater or catch rain, and also because I was already taking the plastic for use as shelter.

I also skipped the c-rats because of an optimistic thought we might be found soon, and also for not knowing how big a “case” of them is.

42

Well that’s why I would choose the shaving mirror it’s much larger. See this one is a standard sextant…they have a small mirror…and when drifting, you are doing just that…drifting.

That area of the pacific - the southern portion is heavily traveled monthly shipping lane, all over that area are freightliners, trawlers, and a myriad of little atolls and other structures. For me it would be the ideal place to be adrift. Well actually I take that back, if it were 100 degrees and humid that can kill. Perhaps adrift in the atlantic in the summer would be best, I’d be blown from here [Connecticut] to africa or spain or if I were lucky the azores. But with the gulf stream and all I’d probably slam into Nova Scotia or Labrador…

43

Here was my reasoning why I chose the items I did the first time:
YES: Water, obvious. Rations, also obvious. Shaving mirror to signal. Plastic sheeting for shelter, possibly catch water. Rope to improvise with. Fishing kit to try to catch more food&moisture.
NO: Rum, distilled alcohol will kill you if you’re dehydrated. Chocolate, an energy dense nutrient but the C-rations are better. Sextant and Map, useless to anyone but an experienced navigator. Mosquitoe netting… are there mosquitoes in the middle of the ocean? Transistor radio… what station are you going to pick up, and what good would it do you? Floatation Seat Cushion: if you lose the raft, you’re dead. The cushion might give you another 12-24 hours. Shark Repellent: I’ve always heard shark repellent was of doubtful efficiency. Oil/Gas mixture: didn’t see the need for it having priority over the items I chose.

44

Errr, what were you planning on placing the water in, after you funnel it down your plastic tarp? Your hands? You need a container to store the water. You cannot place it in the bottom of the raft, as any amount of salt water accumulating in the bottom of the raft will contaminate the fresh water.

Plus, were you planning on rowing 1000 miles to the nearest land? Even apart from the fact that you are going to expend all kinds of energy rowing and require more food and water as a result, there is no way you are going to overcome any ocean currents or the wind. You won’t accomplish anything rowing except dying faster.

At first I thought the fishing gear was pretty important too, but the rope when you think about it is super valuable. Much more so than the fishing equipment or the net. The chances of capsizing or being overturned are fairly high I would think. So unless you have some means of tying everything to the boat, you are SOL if there is a squall. You lose your plastic, in which case you are dead from the elements, or dead from a lack of water. You lose your water jug, in which case you die because you don’t have any place to put the fresh water assuming you still have your plastic.

45

I had the exact same choices and score as bouv’s first try, then I switched out two items that the scenario said were useless and got 99 overall.

I thought the sextant might be useful because your supposed to have the ship’s crew with you and I figured one of them knew how to use it but I didn’t figure on what you would do with the information.

46

In the book Adrift, I believe the fellow was able to judge his lat by just sighting the north star and the degrees it was off the horizon. I suspect you could use the Southern Cross (?) to do the same in the south pacific.

I believe he used a couple of pencils that he tied together and sighted along. I think you could do this with a small length of rope held out at arms length and measured the distance (tie a knot) and compare from previous readings. It would have to be very calm seas of course.

He fashioned a sea anchor out of something, which helped prevent the wind from pushing him in the wrong direction (north and south). Pulled the anchor in when it was pushing him in the right direction.

I thought that some of the plastic and rope might be able to be used for a sea anchor, but then, fifteen feet isn’t much as you would probably use most of it to tie your supplies.

20 square feet of plastic is not much. Four feet by five feet.

15 feet of rope is not much.

And I wonder if a gas oil mix poured on water would really start on fire. I suppose we are talking 2 stroke mix. You would need a small bit of plastic and rope to try to keep the matches dry. Good luck.

47

You’d better hope it rains in the first 36 hours, because after that, without water, you’re dead.

You don’t bottom fish in the open ocean. The fish are at the surface. Or they used to be: they’ve been wiped out by drift net fishing to some degree. Plus fish congregate under floating things. Read about the Con Tiki expeditions: their raft had large fish schooling under it.

48

Woot! I got 99% first try.

I figured you’d need water, food, shelter (and something to tie the tarp on with) and because we know the crew has matches, paper and cigarettes I figured you’d need something flammable. The mirror seemed like a good idea for signalling.

Rum in a small raft of stressed people is asking for trouble.
Chocolate didn’t seem like a good alternative to army rations.
The map, radio and sextant are pointless in an engine-less rubber raft 1000 miles from land.
Sharks could be hit with the oars and mosquitos are the least of your worries!
One seat cushion isn’t going to help unless someone falls overboard, when the rope could be more helpful at actually getting them back in.
Raw fish (assuming you caught some) could cause more problems than it solves.

49

I got annoyed. I didn’t take the water because I took the tarp, intending to build a solar still/rain catching device. The game is not impressed with my cleverness and dings me for not taking the water. Hurrumph.

50

99% first try :smiley:

My own thought is to tie one crew member to the raft and give him the cushion. Then bring everything in the saved space.

51

I did pretty good on my first try. I took the mirror, water, c-rations, radio, plastic, and fishing kit, and scored a 61, with a 94% life expectancy, but only a 46% for shelter and 43% for attracting attention. This was my thinking:
[ul][li]Sextant – There’s no indication that anyone knows how to use it. This is 2007, not 1807. The sextant was probably in a glass display case, while we relied on a GPS system.[/li]
[li]Shaving Mirror – Good signaling device.[/li]
[li]Five-Gallon Can of Water – obvious.[/li]
[li]Mosquito Netting – There won’t be mosquitoes in the middle of the ocean. (Will there?) The thought of using it for a fishing net never even occurred to me.[/li]
[li]U.S. Army C-Rations – obvious.[/li]
[li]Maps of the Pacific Ocean – What will we do with them? We don’t have a motor, and we’re not likely to row 1000 miles with a pair of oars. Plus, we don’t have a compass, so we’ll have only a vague sense of direction anyway. The odds that the maps will be useful seem small.[/li]
[li]Seat Cushion – What good will that due? We have a raft, and if that sinks we are totally fucked.[/li]
[li]Oil-Gas Mixture – We don’t have a motor, and we’re not going to be cooking anything, so I didn’t see any use for this. It didn’t occur to me to light it on fire as a signal.[/li]
[li]Small Transistor Radio – I thought we could use it for communication. I guess I thought it was a two-way radio, not a little Walkman or something.[/li]
[li]Shark Repellent – I’ve always heard that this is useless. Leave it.[/li]
[li]20 ft[sup]2[/sup] of Plastic – Good for shelter, and maybe to collect rainwater.[/li]
[li]160-Proof Puerto Rican Rum – No way. Alcohol dehydrates you. This would make our thirst worse, not better.[/li]
[li]15 ft of Nylon Rope – I didn’t see any use for this.[/li]
[li]Chocolate Bars – They have lots of calories, but no nutritional value. Plus, I thought that the sugar and caffeine might make us thirsty, causing us to use more of our precious water. The C-rations seemed like a much better choice.[/li]
[li]Fishing Kit – I thought this would be useful. Add me to the chorus of people screaming, “How am I supposed to know that the fishing around here is bad?”[/ul][/li]
After taking out the useless radio and allegedly useless fishing kit, I experimented with other items, and after choosing the oil-and-gas and the rope I got 99% in all categories.

52

Your overall survival IQ is 61.
Your ability to stay alive is 94%
Your ability to protect yourself from the elements is 46%
Your ability to catch the attention of your rescuers is 43%

Well my survival IQ is not so great but it sounds like I will at least stay alive.

53

99% first try. No surprise since I not only grew up on survival stories and woodcraft, I have some first-hand practical knowledge of such too. I do disagree with it a bit since it’s setting a hard limit on the items you can take, and people can be quite creative with minimal tools if they have to be. That said, it’s a game, and by setting that limit they are forcing you to prioritize.

Some responses to the complaints that some items seem more useful than they rate them: The fishing kit might be useful, but probably not. First of all, you’ve got no bait, at least until you catch your first fish; then you can use its guts for bait. You’re more likely to lose your piece of C-ration if you use that for bait, and anyway that stuff is usually semi-solid mushy gunk. Good luck using that. Second, line fishing is inefficient at best, and often completely useless unless fish stocks are teeming.

The problem with using the netting is that you have no weights, and in any case most people aren’t going to have the skills to either rig it for static catching, or for throwing. If you had a spear or something to make one, you’d be much better off fishing with that than either a net or line. Faster, less left to chance, and not particularly hard to master. Of course, in the scenario you don’t have the stuff to make a spear fishing rig.

A sextant is mostly useless without an accurate clock and either tables for figuring out the longitude from the angle, or the mathematical knowledge of how to derive the figures from your readings. If you’ve got the navigational know-how, all that you can realistically accomplish is to know where you are as you’re dying because you left other, more useful stuff behind. Like earlier posters said, knowing where you are and where you’re going is only useful if you can affect your course. In this case, you can’t, so the sextant and map are worthless except for initial mental comfort.

You should never, ever, in a million years, pass up a sure source of water for hypothetical potential water in the future. Can you make a solar still? Have you done so? Tested it? Made sure it works with sea water? Do you know how much you can process and in what time period with the rig you have? Even if you said yes to all these questions, the 5 gallons of water is probably more important than everything else they give you for survival purposes put together.

Water is absolutely the most important thing in a survival situation. You can survive with no food for days or weeks. You can survive a surprising amount of exposure to the elements, though you won’t be very comfortable. But without water, you’ve got a couple of days, at best, before you’re dead. Solar stills provide a trickle of water that takes a long time to accumulate. With that 5 gallon head-start, you might not be dangerously thirsty for a while if you are lucky and you do a great job with the rig. The still will only ever be a supplement to keep a diminishing water store from being exhausted very quickly and would never replace a ready source of water.

54

Survival IQ 41!?!? Bullsh*t! Why carry a 5-gallon tin of water in the raft when it will float nicely beside the raft tied to the rope? In my scenario, I tossed it over, but kept it, and used the plastic as a solar still when the tin ran out.

I brought the rum for disinfectant, and the fishing kit because it never said it didn’t include bait/lures. And I left out the signal mirror because my oil would be signal enough.

Their scenario has you surviving for a week. In my take on the situation, you could be afloat for months. Also, I would totally stop at the floating carnivorous island covered in meerkats. I could sleep in the tree.

55

The quiz said I get sunburned but live, with a survival IQ of 60. Little do they know what would really happen:

Coffeespouse, coffeefriend, and I get in the life raft. After a day or so, we are all sunburned and miserable. Coffeespouse is stressed out, so the two of us fight over my stupid choice of life raft over chocolate, which I should know is one leg of her Triumvirate of Power (the others being Diet Coke and toilet paper.) A plane flies overhead, but I am despondent because I feel she doesn’t love me anymore, and no one else can figure out what to do with the signaling mirror. Meanwhile, after 36 hours without weed, coffeefriend insists on jumping over the side and swimming for it, because his infallible sense of direction tells him we are very close to both Jamaica and Holland. We consider tying him up with the fifteen feet of nylon rope; instead, coffeespouse talks him out of taking rash actions. The next day, Una Persson rescues us in her folding titanium and fiberglass yacht, which she always brings in her carry-on luggage. (Doesn’t everyone?) Two days later, she starts to wonder if rescuing us was such a good idea.

56

My only beef is that they don’t give the option of eating some chocolate before setting sail. I mean, I’m leaving it behind, but I see little reason to leave that much energy ashore.

57

After initial IQ of 20, survival chance 90%, followed by IQ 80 survival change 96%, I decided to see how bad I could do. I got the following:

You have isolated exactly where you are, and you plan a trajectory to take you to safe shores. You are able to determine what direction your are going, but your attempts change directions are adversely prevented by the ocean currents. Attempting to tune into a station proves futile. What stations are available do not cover emergencies! Everyone complains about the sunburns, and attempts to don things to protect themselves from exposure to the sun. As you drink from the ocean, your tongue swells from the saltwater. Hunger sets in, you look for things to chew. You notice a plane flying overhead during the evening, But you cannot get their attention. Out of fear you drink the rum To compensate for hunger, you each some chocolate, but it only makes it worse The cushion is used to keep people afloat while getting refreshed in the ocean
No matter what you do, you cannot navigate your raft to safe shores. Out of frustration, the sextant is tossed overboard. No one attempts to retrieve it. The radio is tossed over the side of the raft! Everyone has burned skin and needs medical attention! One dies of suffocation of their swelled tongue. Thoughts of real food impede your attempts to stay focused on the problem at hand! The night plane flies overhead, but does not see you! You pass out and the next day die of exposure! Most of your food supplies are diminished and now you hope rescue is soon A shark attacks the crew member using the cushion

Your overall survival IQ is -45.
Your ability to stay alive is -71%
Your ability to protect yourself from the elements is -26%
Your ability to catch the attention of your rescuers is -38%

I picked sextant, map, radio, chocolate, rum, cushion.

58

I swapped out the fishing kit for the rations on the second try to get all 99s. I dunno, maybe I can blame my initial near-death on Life of Pi?